Between the Lines

Smithsonian and a Whale of a Reality Capture

In this months June 2012 Smithsonian Magazine there is a great article involving Reality Capture by Smithsonian curator Nicholas D. Pyenson Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals where you capture an existing object in a digital form such as a 3D mesh or point cloud. The article is “Save the Whale Bones – Laser scans record fossils” on page 84 of this issue and online at How Two Laser Cowboys-Saved The Day “http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/How-Two-Laser-Cowboys-Saved-The-Day.html”. The article details a unique archeological dig in Chile that was a collection of ancient whales located in the desert where a highway was going to be constructed, so time was of the essence to preserve this scientific anomaly of a group of full whale fossils in a land location Read more →

100k

WOW! almost 100,000 unique Between the Lines blog readers this month. A Sincere Thank You to every single reader! Read more →

Autodesk Octo-Copter Video of Kenya

Last month myself and Gonzales Martinez spent a few weeks in Kenya with Dr, Louise Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute and Yang Deming of the National Museum of Kenya. We were researching several aspects of aerial photography and from a remote controlled copter to not only capture video and photos by map and locate areas of interest for fossil artifacts. We were in the Northern most part of Kenya in the Lake Turkana basin where the earliest evidence of man has been discovered over the years including several skulls dating back millions of years. Gonzalo has taken some of our video from both my camera and the onboard Octo-Copter video as well as photos and posted the video for everyone to enjoy. Read more →

Fifty Plus Shades of Gray Scale

I don’t know what all the fuss about “Fifty Shades of Grey” is, but in AutoCAD alone we have at least 255 shades of gray scale, dithering, and then the powerful monochrome plots! Read more →

Shoulder Work Ahead

I am not sure how it really happened but perhaps one of my falls while rock and slot canyon climbing were the reason or one of the various travel mishaps on a plane with luggage, but in any case both of my shoulders are requiring surgery. It started last year when I noticed I could not raise my arms above my shoulders or throw thing (I love to throw things.) It got worse over time to the point the pain was really bad and I would almost pass out if I moved my arm wrong. My doctors said it was most likely inflation from all my hiking with overstuffed packs or lugging all my computers from airport to airport, and that it would go away taking 2400mg of ibuprofen a day. Read more →

Camtasia Studio 8 – Create Video Smooth as Butter

If you create and edit training videos, screen recordings, demonstrations and product launch videos or more then you have most likely used Camtasia like we do here at Autodesk. I had also converted so many people I know in blogging to this products once they seen how powerful it was. After 7 releases of Camtasia as a user myself my longtime friends at TechSmith decided it was time to re-write the entire architecture of the Camtasia product to provide even more features and a more modern software base to build much more cool and amazing features on top of. Read more →

Design, Raised to the Power of the Cloud

During the course of today (and throughout the week) you’ll likely hear us at Autodesk talking about the latest deployment of Autodesk 360 and Autodesk BIM 360. If you’re familiar with the notion of cloud based services, then Autodesk 360 will be a natural way to extend your designs beyond your local desktop. The power of Autodesk 360 starts to compound when you consider that mobile access means that I could collaborate on this new tower concept design while I was making new friends in Kenya. Read more →

Autodesk BIM 360 takes Infrastructure Modeling to the Cloud

This is how we used to handle infrastructure scale collaboration, conceptual design and feasibility evaluation. Today, we introduce Autodesk BIM 360. Autodesk BIM 360 is the next generation of BIM, is for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Autodesk BIM 360 helps multidiscipline design and construction teams improve project outcomes by moving computational-intensive tasks to the cloud, enabling more rapid visualization and simulation and optimized collaboration with access to intelligent data-rich models. Conceptual design and feasibility evaluation service, featuring the Autodesk... Read more →

Never Sleep Near a Hyrax

Recently while in Kenya I found out what a Hyrax is, and why they are evil and not to be slept near. A Hyrax is a small rodent looking thing that is actually related to the elephant with little small tusks. Now here is why I call these cute unique animals evil, they have a tendency to scream at about 160 decibels from 10pm to 5am sounding like someone is being murdered. Read more →

ScriptPro for AutoCAD 32bit and 64bit

ScriptPro for AutoCAD has been around for many years and for those that have tried it, it is a very valuable time saving free tool. ScriptPro is used to batch process files in AutoCAD using a script so perhaps a minor edit to DWG files such as adding company standard layers, a stamp, a title block, audit and repairs and much more. ScriptPro for AutoCAD is free and now available in both Windows 32bit and 64bit for 2008 and up releases of AutoCAD based products. Read more →

Autodesk 360 Error - Hotfix Now Available

I experienced this myself on my system most likely due to all the pre-release versions of products I had on my machine and various version of files and file name conflicts. The issue is the Autodesk 360 icon would error on my system tray frequently. I had been working with the QA & software development team on this to research it. There is now a hotfix available for Autodesk 2013 products to solve this but make sure to read the... Read more →

Autodesk Smoke 2013 for Mac Pre Release Available Free

A free pre-release trial of the new Autodesk Smoke 2013 for Mac is now available for immediate download at the Product Trial page. This was the hot new product release announced for professional video editors and shown at NAB 2012. Read more →

I Kissed a Giraffe, and I Think I Liked It...

I recently spent a couple weeks in Kenya mostly working from sunup to sundown with Dr. Louise Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute, Deming Yang of the National Museums of Kenya and my colleague Gonzalo Martinez.of Autodesk. I thought I might share a fun photo with you from the Giraffe Centre located just outside Nairobi Kenya before our research work in Northern Kenya began. So here is me taking a big wet kiss from a rare female Rothschild Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi.) Read more →

MakerBot and Met Museum Puts Historic Artwork In Your Hands

Our wildly creative 3D mad scientist friends at MakerBot recently gathered a group of artists and captured several objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in a Hackathon event using Autodesk’s own 123D Catch which is free and available to use on your PC, your iPad or on the web. They were then able to create 3D prints from their MakerBot 3D printers as well they posted many on the Thingiverse for everyone to mod or print. Read more →

AutoCAD 2013 Help Online

If you ever needed to look up something in the AutoCAD 2013 Help documentation and do not have access to AutoCAD, you can always visit the online documentation site. http://docs.autodesk.com/ACD/2013/ENU/index.html Read more →

AutoCAD 2012 and AutoCAD LT 2012 Service Pack 2 Released for Download

In a continuing effort to improve customer experience and product quality we released a Service Pack 2 for AutoCAD 2012 and AutoCAD LT 2012. Read more →

Back from Kenya

To sum it up in one word “Amazing” would be appropriate. I will be posting more on what we did in Kenya and the experience including a couple crazy travel stories over the next couple of weeks. As I review and edit my 6000+ photos, I will be uploading many of them to my Flickr photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/btl/. Read more →